Back to Manatee today with Jeno

[fghray1]

Before I tell you about todays dive I have to start with Sat.


I went to Manatee yesterday for a well planned dive with a Buddy.
Had a nice dive planned but it turned into a SNAFU. We planned on running up stream from Freidman and then just slowly drift out all the way to Manatee to avoid the duck weed ( they opened it for the first time this year)
Now for the story. Buddy shows up to late to do Friedman. Went to Catfish instead. Got in, ran line, and my buddy call the dive after 200 ft. GOOD THING TOO. just about that time I hear a big hiss and feel bubbles streaming under my arm pit. Look down and my pressure grauge hose decided it was a good time to retire from service. No bigy shut the tank down, left the hole.
Buddies problem he say was wet second stage. We fix both b problems and go back in and do just a simple traverse to Manatee. All went fine till we exited the Manatees decided they like the basin so much they came back and we didn't know they had closed it again. Rangers weren't happy but polite when they asked us to get out. But of course they had the exits blocked and we had to climb out with they gear under the lines. We had a great big 10 min dive. But we did have 2 of them.


Now for today. Jeno is doing side mount (I must say she is doing well)
She is even wearing a helmat with her lights mounted on it. We decided to go to the sewer line but because she is still playing with the side mount configuration we went in at catfich instead of friedman. Not sure if I could make it up that far and then into the sewer on thirds but the flow gods were with us today. Still kinda low. The vis is going milky fast now. Hard to believe that it was clear 5 weeks ago with no flow at all. I got spoiled. Anyway we made it up and jumped to the sewer. Buy this time I could hear jeno swearing at her inflater that she misplaced. Funny how you can lose something attached to you and get made at it for hiding. Well if you had someone pushing your buttons constantly youo'd hide too. Well we went up the sewer line which is really the friedman bypass at this point. We jumped and went and found our cookies we left last week. I still had 200 psi left to play so I pushed mine up another 50ft. Not much but if I got dressd and went to the party I had to dance, EVEN IS JUST A LITTLE. We turned drifted out and then at the end we decided to exit threw the small side mount passage at the 100 ft jump. A first for Jeno so I let her go first. I figured it was going to be a silty ride. IT WAS. I had to laugh when she finned the floor and what was nice and clear in front turned to a dust silt cloud. Waited a minute for it to leave and kept going Jeno got to swim ( OR SHOULD I SAY CRAWL) with the cloud. She did good. I had a ball. She asked to swith places so we did and we exited. Amazing how in 24 hours you can go from a disaster to a IT DON'T GET BETTER THAN THIS DIVE.
I attached a map of the location of the cookies and the small side mount passage.